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NEVERMORE
Doc Nevermore is an authorial voice created by family men who worked with psychologists Carl R. Rogers and Abraham H. Maslow at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1960s, Rogers and Maslow, the famous co-founders of humanistic psychology, were fellows of the institute; Nevermore was their research associate.
From 1967, Rogers and Nevermore co-edited Studies of the Person. A textbook series of 16 volumes on humanistic education. Maslow didn't participate. It seems he'd anticipated what would come to pass.
Two years after Maslow's death in 1970, the series also died. His own late-life opinion of humanistic education had been confirmed: it preempts parents or silences them. Either way, it leaves children less protected, an easier mark for exploiters.
Sexual Decision Making
The narrator of the video was a physician from a woman's health center in San Francisco. He began with a friendly "Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Policar. I'm here to give you some important information about how to prevent pregnancy .... You're told you can't vote till you're 18. And in many states, you're told you can't drink until you're 21. But the decision to have sex is your own. and it's an adult one. That means that you, and not anyone else, decide when and if you're ready for sex."
Doc Nevermore reports that on seeing this, one of the neighbors hit the pause button on the VCR. "Is he saying what I think he's saying? Is he saying to impressionable youngsters, .'You're ready for sex if you say you are'?" Her husband said, "it does sound that way, doesn't it You say you want to be adult, but you're too young to vote? You've been warned the law prohibits drinking by minors? Try sex.'"
The video resumed. Fifty seconds followed on postponing sex. The tone of it was "That's okay too." Then came the pitch for contraceptives. Truly, it did seem hard sell. It was more than eight times as long as what preceded. The doctor concluded with what he called the bottom line. "The bottom line is, if you're not ready for pregnancy and the responsibilities you'd face as a parent, then use birth control every time you have sex."
"The bottom line is 'birth control every time'?" a father said. "I know whose bottom line that is."
Facilitation Today
For the Nevermore team, those reconstructed purveyors of the misbegotten art of classroom facilitation, the teacher guidelines were as fascinating as the film and the poster. Page two opined that it was bad educational form for the teacher to have an opinion: "Ideally," the guidelines said, "your role in the discussion should be minimal. We suggest that you appoint a student discussion leader from your class to conduct the talk."
If the question is "For whom is such an arrangement 'ideal'?" the answer has to be Ortho. An article in Contemporary Ob/Gyn last November spoke of the need "to involve adolescents in peer-group discussions." Why? Because "we have found peers in groups ... supportive of contraceptive use and continuation."
It's clear, in general, that peers promote dubious schemes and products more confidently than teachers do. It's clear that sexual experimentation is more likely to follow when the class is led by peers than when it is led by the teacher. The average teacher is aware of being subject to the authority of the community. The average group of peers is less likely to feel that responsibility.
So here's how it is with the contemporary art of facilitation: it's a system of classroom interaction in which the recommended stance of the responsible adult is to refuse to teach. What it's come down to is a better shot at our kids and grandkids by the peer group and dealers.
Like Abe Maslow, Doc Nevermore is deeply sorry.
-W.R.Coulson
Coulson joined the Nevermore team in 1963. A member of the Technical Advisory Panel on Drug Curricula, U. S. Department of Education, he is professor in the clinical psychology program at U.S. International University.
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STOP PRESS Vol.18 No.1 